Archive Madness: Still Crazy after Twenty-Five Years

This essay’s title is inspired by the Delft conference’s call for papers, specifically on addressing ‘the pragmatics of how [intelligence] happens, who institutes it, and through which technologies it is archived’. This essay addresses how the collective work of developing the Deleuze Seminars archive causes signs to circulate through specific archiving practices with the hope that the results will tend more towards the passional than the paranoid, towards causing the circle of meaning to evolve into intelligence and new lines of creativity. We therefore trace both the bases on which we have developed just such an archive and then diverse anomalies that created blockages to smooth transcription and translation, concluding with some precise pragmatic appeals for assistance in helping these signs to circulate.